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How to use Paid Online Advertising Effectively

There are dozens or hundreds of books, blogs and newsletters out there trying to convince you that there’s a dark secret to using paid ads, but there isn’t – it takes experience, hard work and a bit of luck to create a successful digital marketing strategy.

boxChilli is a premier digital marketing company in Portsmouth and we’ve helped dozens of local businesses develop an effective online marketing strategy. As a result, we’re in a better position than most to give you our 3 main guidelines for using paid advertising to draw traffic to your website.

Know what you’re buying

Advertising online is like advertising in any other media. A company worth dealing with should be clear about exactly what you’re buying, whether that’s a full page ad in a national newspaper or a thousand clicks on an ad network.

As a general rule, online advertising is sold on a per view basis. If you pay for a certain number of views, the website owner commits to showing your advert to their readers that many times. However, the website owner cannot guarantee that the viewer will be someone who is interested in your product. You can improve the chances of this by choosing the type of website and time of day that the advert is shown, just as if you were sponsoring a TV show.

Be Realistic

Although you pay for views, what you want is for customers to click through to your site and ideally purchase something or make an enquiry. It’s important to be aware that people are bombarded with so many adverts online that they don’t even register most of them, never mind click the tempting link. This is one reason that you can buy a higher number of page views online than in print media for the same money. In many cases, a 1% click through rate is a success.

Digital marketing gives you far greater feedback than conventional media. At a minimum, you should be given information about how many clicks were made on your advert and your website should be able to record where visitors came from, so you can see how successful your campaign was and refine it. For example, as a many of our clients are local businesses, boxChilli focuses our efforts on digital marketing Portsmouth, rather than London or the UK as a whole.

Follow Up

If someone does click on your advert, make it easy for them to find the offer or product you mentioned. This often means creating a special page to direct the link in the advertising to. Many online shoppers distrust adverts, so if you can make your site easy and reassuring to use, then viewers are more likely to become clients.

As an example, if your digital marketing strategy is to advertise a great discount on a product, the advert should take you directly to the page featuring that product, ideally with an easy to see notification indicating the discount and a button saying something like ‘buy now’. If you drop customers onto your home page, and they have to search for the offer or product, they may decide it’s not worth the effort, reducing the effectiveness of your digital marketing.